Basic Formal Ontology

"BFO grows out of a philosophical orientation which overlaps with that of DOLCE and SUMO. Unlike these, however, it is narrowly focused on the task of providing a genuine upper ontology which can be used in support of domain ontologies developed for scientific research, as for example in biomedicine within the framework of the OBO Foundry. Thus BFO does not contain physical, chemical, biological or other terms which would properly fall within the special sciences domains.

The BFO project was initiated in 2002. The theory behind BFO was developed initially by Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon and presented in a series of publications listed here. Since then important contributions to BFO have been made by many people, including: Werner Ceusters, Chris Mungall, Fabian Neuhaus, Holger Stenzhorn, Alan Ruttenberg, Mathias Brochausen, Bjoern Peters, Kerry Trentelman, and by more than hundred other members of the BFO Discussion Group. Its development has been carried out under the auspices of the project Forms of Life sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation."